What did Hitler
confide to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem on November 25,
1941?

Reader's
Letter by historian J S F Parker, University of York,
to The Sunday Times, July 17, 1977

THOUGH not an expert on the
subject-matter of David Irving's Hitler's
War, investigated by Gitta Sereny and Lewis
Chester (page 17, last week), I should like to draw
attention to a document which seems to me to suggest very
strongly indeed that Hitler knew of the plans for the
systematic extermination of the Jews right from their
inception.

On November 25, 1941,
some five weeks before the Wannsee
conference that decided on the " Final Solution," Hitler
gave an audience in Berlin to the exiled Mufti of Jerusalem,
Haj Amin al-Husseini.

In the course of their talk the Mufti tried
unsuccessfully to elicit a comprehensive statement of German
sympathy for Arab nationalist aims in the Middle East. After
giving his reasons for not making such a statement
immediately (mainly that it would upset relations with Vichy
France) Hitler, according to the official German Foreign
Office record of the interview, told Haj Amin, "enjoining
him to lock it in the uttermost depths of his heart"
that:

At the some moment which was impossible to set
exactly today but which in any event was not distant, the
German armies would in the course of this struggle reach
the southern exit from Caucasia. As soon as this had
happened, the Führer would on his own give the Arab
world the assurance that its hour of liberation had
arrived. Germany's objective would then be solely the
destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab
sphere under the protection of British power.
(Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918-1945, Series
D, Vol. XIII no. 515).